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Big Brother
HAROLD "BIG BROTHER" WHARTON (1883-1951) DICTATOR OF AIRSTRIP ONE, FOUNDER OF INGSOC History On January 3, 1883, Harold Wharton was born in Putney, London, into a middle-class family, the seventh of eight children. His father was Henry Wharton, a solicitor, and his mother was Ellen Bravery Watson, the younger sister of Dr. John Watson, the left hand of the famous detective Sherlock Holmes. Harold attended his schooldays at Greyfriars School located near the market town of Courtfield. Harold's life in school was relatively uneventful until he reached the Remove, the Lower Forth class, when he became form captain, following the bully George Bulstrode. With his new position as captain, Wharton became known as a stubborn, strong willed bully and as a natural leader. He frequently participated at the adventures of fellow student William "Billy" Bunter. In 1904, Wharton graduated with a Second Class Honours BA in Modern History. He then trained as a lawyer, and was called to the Bar in 1906. From 1906 to 1909, Wharton worked as manager of Haileybury House, a club for working-class boys in Limehouse in the East End of London, where he allegedly met and worked for the criminal genius Dr. Fu Manchu who was hiding in his Limehouse lair after a bloody gang war against Professor James Moriarty and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. He joined the Independent Labour Party in 1908, and became active in London local politics. When the assassination of Freedonian aristocrat Alexander Teasdale in 1914 triggered World War I, enlisted in the British Army. During World War I, Wharton was given the rank of captain and served under Herbert Kitchener in the Gallipoli Campaign in Turkey. After a period of fighting in the heat, sand, and flies he became ill with dysentery and was sent to hospital in Malta to recover. This may have saved his life, as while he was in hospital he missed the Battle of Sari Bair in which many of his comrades were killed. The Gallipoli campaign had been masterminded by Winston Churchill. Wharton believed that it was a bold strategy, which could have been successful if it had been better implemented. This gave him an admiration for Churchill as a military strategist. In 1917 he had been promoted to the rank of Major and until the end of the war his soldiers referred to him as "Major Big Brother". After the war, he became interested in local politics in the immediate post-war period, becoming mayor of the Metropolitan Borough of Stepney in 1919, one of London's poorest inner-city boroughs. In early 1922, Wharton married Bessie Bunter, the little sister of his former schoolmate Billy Bunter. Their four children were Janet Helen (born 1923), Felicity Ann (1925), Martin Richard (1927) and Alison Elizabeth (1930). During the interwar period, Wharton became more and more involved with politics. At the 1922 general election, Wharton became the Member of Parliament (MP) for the constituency of Limehouse in Stepney. In the following years he was appointed member of a Royal Commission and later Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster until he left the Labour Party after its rejection of his proposals for solving the unemployment problem in 1930. Together with fellow politician Sir Roderick Spode, 7th Earl of Sidcup, Wharton formed the British Union of Fascists in 1932. Informally members of this party were called "the Black shorts". In the midst of World War II, Nazi Germany invaded England according to Operation Sealion in 1940. Under the famous Field Marshal Erwin Rommel Nazi troops attacked London and nearly succeeded in defeating the British defenders. While the battle still was being fought in the streets of London, Harold Wharton secretly met with Emmanuel Goldstein, a high-ranking member of the Labour Party. They combines there political ideologies to a party called "Ingsoc" (English Socialism) and together, they used the current weakness of the British military to initiate a revolution causing Ingsoc to become the dominant party of the United Kingdom which was turned into a dictatorship called Airstrip One. Soon, Airstrip One would become possibly the most oppressive regime in human history. In only a few years, the Ingsoc Party took control over everything spreading its influence from economy, infrastructure and medias to military, security and espionage. The Party formed the Oceania Pact (an intergovernmental military alliance which would one day become the NATO) with nations such as the USA and Canada in order to prevent other states or the United Nations from interfering in British affairs as the Ingsoc regime initiated world wide opposition. With the borders to the outside closed preventing the arrival of information from the outside, the party misinformed its people, that after World War II the world was split up between three powerful superstates stuck in perpetual war: Oceania composed of the Americas, Britain and South Africa; the Stalinistic nation of Eurasia formed when the Soviet Union absorbed continental Europe and the death-worshiping Eastasia. In 1945 Emmanuel Goldstein - the second important leader of the Ingsoc revolution alongside Wharton - was becoming more and more determined to end the dictatorship and to return to democracy due to qualms of conscience. But Wharton could not led this happen: Instead, he proclaimed Goldstein an enemy of the state and ousted him. Becoming a communist and thus taking refuge in the Soviet Union ("Eurasia") and the People's Republic of China ("Eastasia"), Goldstein began to form "The Brotherhood", a society aiming at the destruction of Ingsoc. At the same time Wharton held a fake election and used his newly gained supremacy to turn himself into a medium of propaganda: referring to an old nickname from his military time, he called himself Big Brother (or "B-B" for short) while spreading propaganda slogans like "Big Brother is watching you", "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength." and "We have always been at war with Eurasia/Eastasia." In the following years, Big Brother would advance Ingsoc even further by establishing the four Ministries: The Ministry of Love which enforced loyalty and love of Big Brother through fear, a repressive apparatus, and brainwashing; the Ministry of Peace which controlled the British army and navy; the Ministry of Plenty, which kept the population poor and weak to be easier to rule over and the Ministry of Truth, which altered articles, documents and historical texts in order to fit the current political line of the Party and to eliminate the memory of 'unpersons', people who have been executed by the Party. Everybody opposing the Party who wasn't executed immidiatly was either brainwashed or send to a "joycamp" (the official term for forced labor camps) such as "The Village". The Two Minutes Hate became a daily period in which Party members have to watch a film depicting the Party's enemies (notably Emmanuel Goldstein and his followers) and express their hatred for them and the principles of democracy, while English was replaced by Newspeak, the world's only language that grows smaller. During the Airstrip One period, every move of every single party member was kept under surveillance by an agency of spies and guards called the Thoughtpolice using any method available: armed patrols, helicopters, agents in civvies, eavesdropping neighbors, bugging system and telescreens - machines that work both as security cameras as well as broadcasting devices. Additionally, the telescreens were essentially for spreading the Ingsoc propaganda. While the Thoughtpolice was in charge of interior affairs and surveillance, two new intelligence agencies were formed which would compete with each other for the following decades. These were MI6 led by a man simply called M with James Bond being the most famous agent, as well as a group which would become known as called "The Avengers" after Ingsocs fall, formed by Wharton's brother-in-law Billy Bunter known as Mother and with agents such as John Steed, Emma Peel, Tara King, Harry Lime, Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond, John Drake and Agent Number Six. These newly established agencies would have to fight criminal organizations such as the Goldstein Brotherhood, Quantum and Sebastian Moran's THRUSH. On the other hand, the traditional group of British heroes known as the 'League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' (which existed in England since the days of Queen Gloriana) was disbanded and its very existence was denied leading to the two remaining members of the League - Mina Harker and Allan Quatermain - to become dissidents fighting the regime. But the days of Big Brother would come to an end: On November 27, 1951, a plot hatched by the ambitious high-ranking party member Gerald O'Brien led to Big Brother's assassination by a brainwashed citizen called Winston Smith. O'Brien became the new dictator of Airstrip One, keeping all the principles of his predecessor alive, as well as Big Brother's image: only a few high-ranking members of the party that were loyal to O'Brien were informed of Big Brother's death. The rest, as well as the public, thought the leader would still be alive. Thus, Big Brother turned from a real person into an entity crafted by the Party and shaped by O'Brien to be both terrifing and fatherly. But a fraud like this could not be held secret for long: Only mere months later the fraud was exposed and with Big Brother officially being declared dead, O'Brien was unable to maintain power, and conceded to the Brotherhood's demands to reinstated democracy. Soon after, he was voted out of office, and most of the Ingsoc government's programs were reversed leading to the end of Airstrip One. The last secrets of Ingsoc disappeared when the remains of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen stole the Black Dossier - a collection of secret documents which contained the secret history of England - and handed it over to Prospero residing in the Blazing World. But Big Brother's heritage would live on - literally. His youngest daughter, Alison Elizabeth Wharton Susan, became the grandmother of Adam Susan who would become the founder of Norsefire, a fascist party which seized power over the United Kingdom after World War III aiming at the revival of Ingsoc and thus following in his great-grandfather's footsteps. Category:Villains